Keep All Those Plates Spinning

I realise this blog has exactly one reader, but I feel I must nonetheless apologise for missing Monday's posting deadline. It's been a heck of a week, and by the time I had a minute to myself on Monday, it was already bedtime. On Tuesday I called in sick to work with a migraine and was mostly too out of it to update, and today I was back at work for a training session.

So, here you have it, a Wednesday update rather than a Monday one.





These days I feel like I've been keeping a lot of plates in the air, and it's only a matter of time before one of them falls to the ground and shatters. I'm not sure which one it's going to be, and that worries me a little.

I'm hoping that if a plate does fall, it'll be one that affects only me and not my family, and the best option for that is for the "health" plate to smash.

Thus far I've been pretty lucky, health-wise. I'm having some miscellaneous trouble with concentration and focus and memory, as well as some weight gain/inability to lose weight and a few other symptoms that point to a potential thyroid issue. Apart from that and the chronic exhaustion of commuting to a different city every week, working multiple rotating twelve-hour shifts and never getting enough sleep when I'm home, I'm doing well. Especially when my girlfriend AND Bean have both dragged around colds and ear infections and chest coughs for two months. I think it's adrenaline and pigheadedness that are keeping me mostly healthy.

If I do end up getting sick, I can only hope that it'll happen when I'm away from home, so that I'll inconvenience as few people as possible. Also, my healthcare card only covers me in Ontario, not Quebec, so I wouldn't be able to get medical care there if I really ended up needing it.

That being said, I'd rather not get sick at all. :P

Any of the other plates almost don't bear thinking about.

1. Something will happen to the car. I've already had one fender-bender in the past four months, and given my chronic exhaustion, I'm mildly worried about it happening again. Granted, the accident was due to black ice, and when I spun out again this Sunday it was also because of black ice and I was able to pull myself out, but one day I won't. I drive an average of 500km a week on very little sleep. The odds are against me.
2. The pets will get sick. We have two very elderly cats, one cat with a chronic respiratory problem, a middle-aged dog and a turtle. They are all expensive to treat if they get sick, and the dog needs minor surgery on one eye that is going to cost a fortune which I don't posses.
3. My girlfriend will somehow not get her reimbursement for daycare from the government for longer than anticipated. She already blithely informed me that I'd have to come up with the money on my own for February because she would only be sending in the paperwork last week. So now I have to come up with basically the equivalent of my mortgage this month to pay for daycare by myself. If I have to do it two months in a row, we're financially screwed. (Also, she got angry with me when I started doing the mental math, trying to figure out how I was going to scrape the money together. I think she didn't get the reaction she was hoping for, which was likely: "Oh, of course, honey. I totally have an extra thousand dollars just lying here on my bedside table!" Or something. I don't know. But apparently I'm not allowed to be stressed about money.)
4. I will screw up something crucial at work and get fired. This is highly, highly unlikely. I'd have to, I don't know, compromise national security in a way that resulted in actual casualties for that to happen, I'm pretty sure. More likely I'd end up with a verbal or written reprimand, but even the chances of that are pretty slim. Like, maybe 1 or 2%. So, yeah, it's not likely, but if I do lose my job then we lose the house, both cars, and any semblance of security we have. So, yeah. It's sitting at the back of my mind and causing stress.
5. My girlfriend will come out and tell me that she's miserable and it's all my fault because I trapped her in a life she's realised she doesn't really want and that she feels she can't get out of because of finances. She wouldn't be able to afford Bean's daycare on her own, she wouldn't be able to find a place with the kind of rent she was paying before anyway, and moving out would cost a fair bit of money, not to mention be a major hassle for her. She also wouldn't be able to take the pastry making class she wants. So if she regrets moving in with me, there's nothing to be done about it now, and the thought that she might not want to live with me, that what we have is making her unhappy, makes me feel physically ill.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that are at the forefront of my thoughts. In better news, though, I've decided to see a therapist a couple of times a month, to help me cope with all this stress better than I am. I am a bit of a mess, as you've no doubt gathered. Self-regulation has never been my forte, so I'm hoping to work on that with her. Also, I seem to spend a lot of my waking hours either anxious or frustrated or both, and that's no way to live.

I don't want to feel like I'm constantly pushing back anger and frustration every time Bean misbehaves or throws himself to the floor and kicks and screams until he's blue in the face, or runs away giggling when it's bedtime and hides under the dining room table, or whines and fusses that he wants a cupcake for breakfast. Bean's behavioural issues are getting worse, if anything (though my girlfriend seems to think he's improving, which baffles me), and if there's to be any hope of improvement then I need to get my own short fuse under better control. It's not enough for me to not react/not snap, I have to be more actively sympathetic and compassionate and patient at these times, not just passive.

I shall leave it there for now. My girlfriend linked me to an article in McLean's the other day about gender-nonconforming kids (particularly one in my city), and I have some thoughts on that which I think I should articulate in written form. Perhaps I'll save that for next Monday's post, to make sure I actually have something to speak about by then. ;)

Stay tuned!